1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and information processing method of executing processes of a workflow.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the process speed and image quality of an electrophotographic printing apparatus or an inkjet printing apparatus are becoming high. Along with this, a printed product generation method called print on demand (to be referred to as POD hereinafter) that aims to handle jobs of small lots in a short delivery time has emerged in contract to the conventional offset printing industry.
The POD market has assimilated digital devices and has made management and control using an information processing system more popular than in the conventional printing industry. In this POD field, efforts to raise the efficiency have been made by implementing automated print workflows using the JDF (Job Description Format) technique.
There also has been proposed a POD printing system using a desktop application, unlike the automatic workflow system using the JDF technique (Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 2003-162404 and 2006-202025).
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-162404 has proposed a method of prohibiting in advance the user from doing print format settings that lead to conflict. In this method, the function of a printer is acquired in advance from a separate system such as a printer driver for managing the function information of the printer, and a print format setting window based on the printer function is displayed. Using this method enables conflict control according to the printer function upon setting the print format. A setting window that displays only settable items is created on the print format setting window using the information of the function of the target printer, thereby performing conflict control.
In such control, however, only an output result within the range of the printer capability is obtained. For example, even when a general-purpose file independent of a printer is to be output to a selected printer, file output is done complying with the selected printer.
To solve this problem, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-202025 has proposed a document processing method which uses print format settings for general purpose. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-202025 describes determining the difference between document data print processing dependent on printer function and general-purpose output processing. To execute the general-purpose file output processing, the function of the target printer is set in a more advanced state, and the general-purpose file output processing is performed assuming that the file is output to a printer having an advanced function.
In Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-162404, however, before generating print data, an application always needs to set the output printer as the conflict control target as a preprocess. For this reason, even in, for example, an imposition process where printer information is unnecessary, the application needs printer information, resulting in overhead to acquire printer information and solve the conflict between printer settings.
In Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-202025, general-purpose file output is enabled by temporarily enhancing the capability of the reference output printer in accordance with print format settings. However, the general-purpose file output aims at outputting data with print settings to the output printer while reflecting the format. Hence, the information of the reference output printer is still necessary, resulting in overhead to acquire printer information and solve the conflict between printer settings.
As for a conventional desktop application, a user starts up the application on the desktop and orders data to be generated and printed via a user interface. Hence, the application cannot cope with a variety of automated workflows of, for example, the JDF system. More specifically, even when an application function requested from a workflow is a part of the workflow, all user interfaces of the application need to be displayed.